


The Perils of Gravity, or a bunch of wizards do stupid things

by NightsMistress



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 09:34:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nita couldn’t say how the idea of tobogganing down the various mountains of the solar system had come about.  She wished she could.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Perils of Gravity, or a bunch of wizards do stupid things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [endquestionmark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/gifts).



Nita couldn’t say how the idea of tobogganing down the various mountains of the solar system had come about. She wished she could. However, she suspected it had to do with the perfect storm of Kit’s watching extreme sports on television and the reckless streak that had made itself more apparent as he shot up in height. With puberty came ridiculous boy antics, or so it seemed. Nita wasn’t sure she liked it.

“He’s been like that for ages,” Carmela said as she lounged on the couch in the Rodriguez’s living room, aimlessly flipping through the channels on the television. Judging from the brief glimpses that Nita got before the channel was changed, Carmela now had access to the interstellar equivalent of HBO. “I’m surprised it took you this long to notice, Neets. He’s always been dumb.”

“He’s not always dumb,” Nita said, smiling a little and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Just … sometimes.”

“Most of the time,” Carmela said, raising a knowing eyebrow. She straightened up from where she was slouched against the back of the couch. “You can admit that and still kiss him.”

“Shouldn’t you be …?”

“Protective? Nah,” Carmela said, waving her hand in dismissal. Nita noted in bemusement that each of Carmela’s fingernails was painted in a different pattern, and wondered how she managed to do that, let alone how how she kept them from chipping. “You’re good for him.”

“Maybe,” Nita said with a sigh. “The thing is: he’s determined to go skating or whatever down Olympus Mons.”

“Which mountain’s that?”

“The one on Mars.”

“I wish I was surprised.”

“Anyway, I’m thinking that if I can’t get him to not do it, at least I could … watch?”

Carmela shook her head in mock despair. “Oh Nita, you sell yourself short. You don’t mean watch. You mean utterly kick his ass, right?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

Carmela kept flipping through the channels, leaving Nita to wonder whether she was looking for anything in particular or just waiting for something to catch her eye.

“We need teams,” Carmela said finally. Nita blinked for a second before realizing what Carmela was talking about: apparently the idea of sliding down a large mountain appealed to Carmela more than Nita had expected. “You, me and Dairine. Kit can choose his fellow victims.”

“Uh,” Nita said. “Is that such a great idea?” Involving Dairine could go one of two ways: either she would blow it off on the grounds that she had important star things to do, or she would become so hypercompetitive that she would reduce her opponent to tears. Her first grade athletics carnival had been notorious because of tiny, delicate Dairine Callahan setting her jaw and utterly decimating her competition. Nita wasn’t sure she was ready to inflict that on a fellow wizard. She was sure that those same fellow wizards would never be.

“I’m sure they’ll survive,” Carmela said. 

“You just want Ronan there,” Nita said.

“Maybe,” Carmela said, her grin widening. “Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean we won’t utterly crush them.”

“Do you want me to give you his number? You could invite him yourself.”

“Ooh, yes, that would be lovely.”

Nita read out Ronan’s cell phone number, which Carmela entered into her phone. Furious finger movements ensued. Nita wondered what she was sending to him.

“Done!” Carmela said brightly. “Now we wait.”

Her phone chimed a few minutes later, and Nita craned her head to read Ronan’s very terse message of ‘no’. 

“He’ll be there,” Carmela said, entirely unfazed. “I know these things.”

"I suppose you want me to check Dair's availability?"

Nita didn’t wait for Carmela's reply. She sent Dairine a message: _Do you want to go tobogganing down extraterrestrial mountains?_ Dairine's reply was almost instantaneous: _Yes, but I want to check it out first_. 

"She's in," Nita said.

"The boys don't have a hope."

*

“Carmela,” Kit said. “What are you doing?”

“I think it looks like a zit,” Carmela said, studying photographs of Olympus Mons on Kit’s computer monitor.

“Could you not refer to Olympus Mons as a zit?” Kit said. “It is the second largest mountain in the solar system.”

“It’s a very big zit then,” Carmela said.

“She’s right, you know,” Dairine said, craning her head. “The resolution’s terrible but it definitely has zit characteristics.”

“I think the important question is whether we can use it,” Nita said, carefully avoiding the issue of whether Olympus Mons did, in fact, look like a pimple on the side of Mars. “The angle doesn’t look too bad.” In fact, the angle looked almost optimal for sand tobogganing.

“Yeah, it’s great!” Kit said. “I measured the angle to be sure, and it’s perfect conditions. Even the sand is perfect.”

“It’s going to be a ton less perfect when it’s in our mouths,” Dairine pointed out, but looked intrigued in spite of herself.

“At least Nita can talk the drains into washing the silt out. Kit here is useless for that,” Carmela said, pretending to confide a secret to Dairine. “Don’t even ask about all of our delicate electronics. Popi’s always finding his Blu-rays being scratched from Mars dust.”

“There’s probably a trick to stop people picking up Mars dust,” Dairine said. “Leave it with Spot and me and we’ll see what we’ve got.” 

“Anyway,” Kit said. “This competition. Do I get to choose anything about it?”

“You get to choose one teammate,” Carmela said. “I already chose Ronan for you.”

“I’m so surprised,” Kit said. 

“He also said no,” Nita said. 

“He’ll come,” Kit said, jerking his chin up and folding his arms. “He wouldn’t abandon me in my time of need.” 

“Time of need? Hanging out with Ronan’s been bad for you; you were never this melodramatic,” Nita said, rolling her eyes. “Have you decided who your other person is?”

“Darryl, probably,” Kit said. “I owe him for the whole Mars thing.”

“By taking him back to Mars?” Dairine said. “Didn’t you get enough of it last time? I have microbe proteges in Uranus gossiping about it.”

“It’ll be fine,” Kit said. “It’s just sand tobogganing. We’re not restarting any alien civilizations.”

“It’s okay if we do,” Nita said. “The kernel likes me. We’ve been talking.”

“Really? What does it say?” Carmela said. 

Nita wasn’t sure how to describe what she and the Mars kernel talked about, or if ‘talk’ was even the right word to use. The dual timelines meant that the kernel had a very skewed perspective on things, even for a planetary kernel, and most of the time Nita was simply existing nearby while it leeched information about its neighbours. When she asked Irina about this, she had looked interested but not alarmed, and told Nita to keep doing what she was doing and let Irina know if anything changed. 

She hoped this didn’t mean she was changing specialties again. She was only now really starting to get a hang of what being a visionary meant, and swapping to geomancy could cut into her time to learn how to control what she saw.

“Mostly that it’s not going to conquer Earth,” Nita said. “I told it we would kick its butt into next week if it tried.”

Kit had the strangest half-smile on his face as he closed up his manual, having just sent Darryl an invite. “Yeah, we did that already,” he said. “So it probably believes you.”

“Probably? I’m far more convincing than that,” Nita said. “I smashed it into paste the last time someone tried to use it against me and it knows it. And I’m just one wizard.”

“Yeah,” Dairine said. “That’s why I think I wasn’t needed on your little Mars adventure. It’d just be overkill having two of us there.”

Kit’s manual dinged, and he flipped it open. “Oh hey, Darryl’s in,” he said, reading the message quickly. “He says he’ll get started on building his toboggan right away, if we’re having this this weekend. Are we having this competition thing this weekend?”

“Yes,” Carmela said firmly. “Otherwise, we’ll all forget. And now that it’s only a few days away, we had better start researching how to build a sled.” 

“I suppose you’ll want us to do the wizardry?” Kit said.

“That would be nice of you,” Carmela said brightly. 

“Fine,” Kit said on a sigh. “I figured it would come down to this anyway.”

*

Mars by day was a dull red as far as the eye could see, though now it was missing the sullen emptiness where the kernel should be. The kernel recognized Nita and greeted her in the way that kernels do once you have held them and spun wizardry through them, though Nita would be hard pressed to describe it to anyone else. Irina would understand, she thought, but it felt strange to have something that Kit didn’t understand.

Nita could see quite a long way, situated as they were on the top of Olympus Mons, with the Martian landscape sprawled out below them. She could appreciate Kit’s fascination with it, even if it was tempered somewhat by her experiences with Aurilelde. She did hope they didn’t uncover any lost cities while they were there.

“You came after all,” Kit said to Ronan, who had set up on a nearby rock and had been messing around with his phone.

“All my other friends are hungover,” Ronan said. “So I figured this was the most exciting thing happening today. Hey, Darryl!”

“Hey yourself,” Darryl said. “You found the best rock here.”

“I think it’s the only rock,” Dairine said. She gestured in a quick, practiced movement, and then sat down on the hardened air near her.

“Nice,” Nita said. “Mind doing that for the rest of us?”

“Only because you asked nicely,” Dairine said, repeating the gesture. Nita had to appreciate her use of wizardry; while Bobo could probably do it better, Dairine was not the embodiment of wizardry, and therefore was at a disadvantage. 

“Wow,” Ronan said, craning his head. “We are a long way up. Kit, how far up are we?”

“Why can’t you look it up yourself?” Kit grumbled. “It’s just over seventy thousand feet.”

Ronan gave Kit a very annoyed look before taking on the staring-off-into-space expression that meant he was accessing his manual. “Don’t you remember what happened the last time some American used Imperial instead of metric here?”

“Fortunately you aren’t the Mars Climate Orbiter and you can look up a conversion,” Nita said. 

“Also,” Carmela said, “twenty-two kilometers doesn’t sound nearly as impressive.”

“You worked that out just then,” Ronan said in tones of great disbelief.

“Yes,” Carmela said, smiling sweetly. “It wasn’t hard.”

“She’s got you there,” Darryl said, his grin growing wider as Ronan scowled at him. “You keep giving her those, you know.”

“That’s what makes it so annoying.”

“Now you know how the rest of us feel around you,” Dairine said. Ronan rolled his eyes.

“Shh,” Carmela said. “It’s my time to talk.”

The wizards all exchanged looks. Kit let his head drop back as he sighed in martyred exasperation.

“Our competition is a time-honored one,” Carmela went on. “Boys against girls.”

“Yeah, because that went so well last time,” Kit muttered.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ronan said. “You did get a girlfriend out of it.”

“I’m something to be ‘got’, am I?” Nita asked. 

“There is no way you can answer that without dying,” Darryl said. 

“Yes, I’m aware,” Ronan said, sighing. “If I die, make sure I get a shallow grave with a view, won’t you?”

“I’m not finished yet,” Carmela said sweetly. “Now, I had thought we could do best of three, but Dairine told me earlier we could be waiting for hours.”

“I’m really surprised no one thought of it earlier,” Dairine said.

“You never told me that was what you were doing,” Kit said. “Every time I asked what you were doing, you went ‘Spoilers!’. I didn’t think you even watched Doctor Who.”

“Kit,” Carmela said in tones of great pity, “everyone watches Doctor Who. You are not a precious snowflake of geekdom anymore.”

“It’s not too late to pull out,” Ronan told Darryl while this was going on. Darryl made a face.

“It’s not about winning, but having fun,” he said.

“No, it’s about winning,” Ronan said. “Because if we don’t, they will make our lives hell for the rest of the summer.”

“True,” Dairine said.

“We will,” Carmela said.

“Maybe only for a few days,” Nita said. “Summer is short, after all.”

“Is that meant to make us feel better?” Kit said, raising his eyebrows. “Because it really isn’t.”

“So, what is everyone using?” Darryl said. “I’m using this.” He pulled a snow mat out of his claudication, propping it up against the edge of the hardened air he was sitting on. “It’s light and really slick on the bottom.”

“That’s pretty smart,” Dairine said. She pulled out something similar, though hers was made of a sort of flexible wood-like substance. “That’s why I did something similar. You want to be as light and as frictionless as possible.”

“Kit, can you get mine out of your pocket thingy?” Carmela said.

Kit sighed and pulled out two wooden planks, and planting them back-end first in the sand to rest against the hardened air that Carmela and Kit were sitting on. Nita was amused to see that Carmela’s was the one painted with a rainbow pattern, while Kit’s was just a solid cool-toned red. 

“Everyone knows that Rainbow Dash is 20% cooler,” Carmela said, noticing her gaze. “Also, Kit thinks making his red will make it go faster.” 

Nita’s own toboggan was similar to Carmela’s and Kit’s: a plank of wood with a very polished base, the nose tilted up to stop its digging into the sand surface, and a rope drilled into the ends so she could steer. The three of them had sat down with Dairine the night before drawing wizardries onto the base to decrease the friction that would be generated between the sand and the board, and they were practically humming in Nita’s mind with their need for speed. When she rested her hand on it to hold it upright, hers vibrated with the need to be skimming across the sand.

Ronan then pulled his out, which was a real estate sign with a rope on the end. He had apparently done a similar friction reducing wizardry, albeit with the subtly different feel that wizardries tend to take when cast by wizards from a different culture than one’s own, and there was another one that Bobo suggested was to reduce the weight on the sign once it was moving. Still, it was a real estate sign with a rope on the end.

“Did you steal someone’s ‘For Sale’ sign?” Dairine said, raising her eyebrows. 

“No!” Ronan said, scowling. “I asked, and you’ll see why in a few minutes.”

“Well, I’m intrigued,” Carmela said, leaning forward. Ronan leaned backward, a dance that Nita found entirely too entertaining for words. “But we’ll see in a few minutes whether it will save you.”

“My summer will be fine,” Ronan said.

“We’ll see,” Carmela said, standing up. “Everyone ready? First one to reach the finish line without crashing wins!”

Nita set up her manual to give a countdown while everyone sat or lay down as they chose on their toboggan. She kicked off and her toboggan skimmed across the mountain surface, picking up speed at a furious rate. Despite herself, she grinned fiercely. She wasn’t the only one exhilarated by the experience, as she could hear whoops and laughter from the others as well.

The effect of Mars’ gravity on them meant that while they weren’t going anywhere near as fast as they might have been on Earth, they didn’t have much traction on the sand either. The reduced gravity and the wizardries minimising friction meant that steering was not an easy thing, with Nita’s toboggan lunging when instead she wanted to do minor course corrections.

In retrospect, they really should have seen the crash coming, but the two minutes before everyone crashed in a heap was very exciting.

*

“Whose idea was it to make it a competition before we even had a chance to experiment?” Dairine grumbled, shaking sand out of her hair. “Couldn’t we have waited a whole hour?”

“Don’t look at me,” Kit said. “It wasn’t my idea to make this a competition.”

“So it’s my fault?” Carmela asked dryly, testing the range of motion of her recently-healed sprained wrist.

“Probably,” Ronan said.

“She’s going to kill you if you keep saying things like that to her,” Darryl pointed out. Carmela bestowed a beaming smile onto Darryl before shooting Ronan a quelling look.

“At least now we don’t have to worry about who won,” Nita said.

“We would have anyway, because more of us went further than the boys.”

Nita couldn’t argue with Carmela’s logic and, judging by the silence from the boys, neither could they. Instead, Ronan pulled out a deck of cards.

“Who’s in?”

Nita and Kit left the others playing poker, and walked up to the summit to look down. Nita could see the slight disturbances from where they’d started sliding down the slope, and she thought she could see where the first accident had occurred, but she couldn’t see the second (and much larger) accident which had happened a minute later. Olympus Mons was so large that it swallowed up any sign of their passage.

“So did you really want to race?” Kit said finally.

Nita huffed a laugh. “Not really. But it was nice to do something with all of us. I’ve been worried about Dairine; since Roshaun disappeared she’s been focused on the star thing. Stuff like this … she hasn’t done that in ages.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “She’s been really angry for a while.”

“And lonely.”

Nita took Kit’s hand in her own, startled yet again by how much larger it was than her own. Kit was a head taller than her and, judging by the gawky length of his arms and legs, he still had more to grow. It was a far cry from the short, stocky boy she had started wizardry with. Of course, she wasn’t the person he started wizardry with either. 

“I suppose not everyone is lucky enough to find their partner when they’re thirteen,” Nita said, her lips quirking in a crooked smile. 

“I always feel bad for those people who don’t know what wizardry’s like without someone beside you. I don’t think I can even imagine wizardry without you.” 

“Yeah,” Nita said. “And I wouldn’t want to.”

There had been times when she had been apart from Kit for a while and there had been times when they had drifted apart to explore different aspects of wizardry, but over the years they had been practicing wizardry, Nita had never wanted to be apart from Kit. Not really. It was nice having someone who, when you turned to them and just said one word, heard the whole conversation.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

“Me too.” 

“But we should probably get back to the others before they blow up Mars,” Nita said, pitching it loud enough so that the others could hear.

“Excuse me?” Dairine said hotly. “I was the only one who didn’t do anything to Mars last time!”

Still holding hands, the two of them returned to the group.


End file.
